What’s New for Designers, June 2014

The June edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, grid systems, game platforms, inspirational resources, Photoshop plugins, text editors, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Scribe

Scribe is a rich text editor framework built and open-sourced by The Guardian. It patches for browser inconsistencies and includes sensible defaults.

Card

Card is a single line of code that can make your credit card forms much more user-friendly. It’s built with pure CSS, HTML, and JS (no images), and includes animations for 4 different card types.

Simple Sharing Buttons Generator

The Simple Sharing Buttons Generator makes it easy to create HTML sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and more. There are several styles to choose from and it’s completely free.

PlayCanvas

PlayCanvas is an easy to use WebGL Game Engine that’s free, open source, and includes collaborative development tools.

Kivo

Kivo makes it easy to annotate PowerPoint or PDF presentations. Just drag and drop your file to upload and get started.

The Awesome Free Toolbox

The Awesome Free Toolbox is a collection of awesome web design tools that includes resources for images, templates, and even hosting.

Griddify

Griddify makes it quick and easy to create custom grid systems with vertical rhythm in Photoshop. It works in Photoshop CS6/CC (though there are bugs in CS6).

Screenshotter

Screenshotter is a free iOS app for organizing your mobile screenshots. It automatically separates your photos from your screenshots, makes it easy to share and archive shots, and lets you arrange them in folders, among other features.

Dept. of Design Web Field Manual

The Day’s Color

The Day’s Color is a color digest with regularly updated palettes inspired by a variety of things, including objects, music, and more.

A to Z CSS

A to Z CSS is a weekly podcast covering a variety of CSS topics. Each episode is short (generally between 4 and 7 minutes), making them easy to actually learn from.

Tumblr Boilerplate

This Tumblr Boilerplate is a simple starting point for creating a great Tumblr theme. It includes post type support, it’s HTML5 based, and it’s optimized for speed.

30 Weeks

30 Weeks is an experimental educational program that aims to give talented designers the tools, mentorship, experience, and other resources they need to start companies and create products that could change the world. While it’s an innovative program, it’s also not cheap: $10,000 (though there are merit and need-based scholarships available).

Get Shit Done

Get Shit Done is a collection of free design elements, including buttons, menus, navigation, typographic styles, notifications, JavaScript components and more. There’s also a paid pro version with more resources.

Pho Devstack 1.0

The Pho Devstack is an automated workflow for front-end developers. It includes tools for compiling, minifying, CSS prefixing, and more.

Filament

Filament is an app “store” for your website that lets you easily install free apps on your site with a drag-and-drop interface, no code required.

Cody

Cody is a free collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets for your website. So far there are snippets for navigation, intros, shopping carts, and more.

Dimensions Toolkit

The Dimensions Toolkit is a Chrome Extension for testing responsive websites that works offline, is refresh-friendly, and lets you add custom breakpoints. There’s also an online version.

Framer.js

Framer.js is a prototyping toolkit to turn static mockups into animated and interactive prototypes.

Tiny PMS Match

Tiny PMS Match is a Tumblr blog that matches up small objects with their Pantone colors. All the photos are taken with an iPhone 5 and edited with Snapseed.